Today information technology (IT) service delivery is achieved via a combination of structured and unstructured activities. In delivering services, service delivery specialists use a variety of tools for management of systems and people, problem solving, and time management.
Today, system vendors provide management software (e.g. DB2 Control Center, WebSphere Admin Console), and specialists create tools using scripts for customization and automation. The focus is typically on cost. To this end, IT service delivery centers utilize a variety of tools to track and manage incidents, problems, changes, releases, and configuration. By using formal process tools, quality, cost, and efficiency of operations are attempted to be tracked and measured in hopes of improving service delivery. Some formal process tools used by specialists, include: tools to manage their time (such as Lotus Notes Calendar), tools to find experts, tools to obtain knowledge (e.g. Google), tools to find solutions (e.g. Online Forums, Technical Support, Red Books), tools to communicate with (e.g. email, instant messaging) with colleagues, and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
The increasing complexity of IT systems impacts the requirements of business that services be successfully delivered. Specialists have been able to develop their own best practices over time, often disseminated by word of mouth. Reuse of some of these customized solutions has occurred, but only to a limited degree, as it requires a deliberate effort by each specialist to document and publish the best practices utilized, tools developed, and configurations used. For this reason, it can be difficult for specialists to find particular practices and tools that they may need for a particular solution. Although search engines may help significantly in this regards, un-contextualizing and re-contextualizing solutions remains to be a serious challenge.
Improving the quality and efficiency of structured activities has received much attention, simply because the availability of workflow tracking information has provided an opportunity to improve services. However, top-down designed processes that have been implemented in workflow systems do not capture all the work conducted and time spent in service delivery, and completely miss unstructured activities. As a result, unstructured human activities are often not well understood, uncoordinated, and unaccounted for in cost estimates. Recent studies have found that considerable time is wasted on these unstructured activities. Unfortunately, without these activities accounted for, the “real cost” of delivering services cannot be quantified.
Some known IT process management tools include workflow tools such as: ticket tracking systems, time reporting tools (i.e. manual logging of time spend on a customer account), change management systems, and release distribution systems, etc. These solutions typically employ an engine where standard processes are encoded as a workflow. Workflows are often designed top-down, rigid, and define only high-level processes.
Other tools include collaboration tools, which may be comprised of general purpose tools for coordinating and collaborating towards delivering a service, e.g. email, knowledge bases, instant message system. Activity management tools may include, for example, The Activity Explorer in IBM Lotus Workplace, which provides support for human coordination and collaboration during participating in unstructured work activities, and ontology and repository for storing activity data (e.g. participants, artifacts, and resources). Administration portals may include web-based solutions that host a suite of administration tools to provide role-based views of various system configurations and tasks.
Current systems that implement one or more of the above tools for service delivery have deficiencies. Top-down design of processes limits discovery and dissemination of new emerging best practices. It is difficult or impossible for practitioners to capture ad hoc or custom extensions to workflow. Rigid processes fail to provide sufficient flexibility to describe ad hoc steps and actions that are necessary in a complex, custom environment. Reuse is limited, since only well-known high-level processes are encoded, leaving out low-level practices which is where the real expertise lies. Collaboration occurs outside of current management environments, thus, ad hoc discussions on system configuration, etc. are not preserved with the associated tools and systems. Finding expertise regarding a particular problem at hand is difficult, as tools do not capture and facilitate previous interactions of users with systems. System management tools are not integrated, thus, it is not possible to mix and match and organize low-level tasks by current activity. Environments fail to preserve the business application context tools run, thus, each user needs to initialize each tool over and over with context-related configuration. No easy and accurate way to account for time and effort spend on unstructured activities is provided.
Accordingly, there exists a need for methodologies and products that can address the deficiencies of existing solutions.